The #1 lever to drive the fastest SEO results is publishing velocity
We choose the projects we work on carefully.
We have to.
We want to enjoy what we do, and the stress of under-delivering doesn’t lead to loving life.
We enjoy the recognition of our peers and clients for doing great work.
We won’t earn the right to work at larger and larger scales if we’re not successful at our current scale.
A successful outcome that doesn’t lead to twice as big opportunities in the future isn’t worth the short term revenue. We’re spinning our wheels doing our best work.
The two most important considerations are always:
Does this brand yearn to be a leader in their space, and want to be everywhere their target audience is searching?
Are we confident we can absolutely crush it?
If the answer is no to either one of these, we have to say no.
And we’re in a good spot where we can prioritize long term growth over short term business needs.
Publishing velocity
We’ve had success across B2B SaaS, B2C SaaS, mobile apps, marketing services, fashion, pets, and outdoor equipment.
And the biggest lever we have to accelerate or decelerate outcomes is publishing velocity.
In every project we have taken on in the last two years, the faster we publish content, the faster we generate rankings, traffic, and business impact.
It’s pretty intuitive — you can’t rank for a keyword until you have a page about that keyword.
And once you publish, it takes 6 – 9 months for that content to fully mature in the search results.
So if your content calendar is 100 pages of content published over a year, content published in months 7 – 12 won’t add the maximum business impact a year after beginning your organic content distribution campaign.
At that publishing velocity, it will take 18 to 20 months after the start of your campaign for your content to fully mature.
But if you front-load your content calendar and publish all 100 pages of content in 4 months, most, if not all of that content will be mature by month 12.
Pushing backlinks, updating your site structure, decreasing page load time, doing on-page optimizations will all begin to impact your rankings and traffic within weeks instead of the six month maturation time of content, plus the time content spends sitting in your content calendar queue.
So, let’s get into it.
Our worst performing project of all time.
ContentDistribution.com’s worst-performing campaign of all time
This anonymous project is our worst performing campaign of all time.
In the 11 months after beginning our engagement, we grew non-branded organic search traffic by 93%, from 887 to 1,717.
In the 11 months before our engagement, organic traffic grew by 14%, from 775 to 887.
That means non-branded organic search traffic grew 664% faster after beginning our engagement than before.
Nearly every page we published is ranking and generating traffic
But we only published 19 pieces of content in 11 months.
When we could have easily achieved 5,000, 10,000 or more qualified visitors each month in this same period.
Very successful outcomes require high rates of publishing
The time it takes to work through your content calendar, and the time it takes for content mature are your two biggest bottlenecks to seeing the business impact from your organic content distribution investment.
The most common reason brands can’t meet publishing velocity goals are:
Senior management inserts themselves in the content review process. This will always fall at the bottom of their priority list.
Too many revisions are requested by too many people at the pay rate provided.
The person responsible for reviewing and editing the content doesn’t report to a campaign stakeholder, AKA the metrics your editor is evaluated on aren’t largely influenced by the success of your campaign.
Budget. Although the rate comes out to less than the salary of a content writer whose words won’t rank.
There are at least hundreds, but probably thousands, and often tens of thousands of keywords that can send your business qualified traffic.
But you won’t rank for every keyword by writing one page of content.
Or two pages of content.
Or ten pages of content.
To capture all of the qualified searches across your funnel and truly be everywhere your target audience is searching, you probably need to publish hundreds of pages of content.
When three or more URLs or pages rank for a pair of keywords, that means we can probably rank for both keywords with one page also.
But if there are two or fewer pages that rank for both keywords, we probably can’t rank for both keywords with one page and will need to create separate content topics to rank for both keywords.
Import thousands of keywords into ClusterAi and get back groupings based on actual search data.
The groupings include the main keyword, variations, and the number of monthly searches across all keywords in a group.
This ClusterAi is for the matcha boys at TenzoTea.com.
100 pages of content * $150/page = $15,000 / 5 months = $3,000/month at 20 pages/month.
If you want to reduce risk to your production schedule, and only give each writer one article per week, you need 5 writers to produce 20 articles per month.
What’s the ROI?
The formula to understanding different SEO ROI outcomes is:
Total Monthly Searches * Click Through Rate * Conversion Rate * Average Order Value = SEO ROI.
We’ve reviewed hundreds of projects and built a handy calculator in Google Sheets to help us understand how driving large volumes of qualified traffic will translate into business success.
Get our SEO ROI calculator to forecast costs and ROI of a successful organic content distribution campaign.
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